“Medical exams,” assistant X2LA3 said once she opened the door.

Kris sighed as he lethargically got up off the honey colored chair, he was drawing an arctic owl or a potato with eyes. Same difference. He followed the assistant to the exam room, inside was the medic in charge waiting for them.

“A new day,” greeted Kris with a bow.

“Indeed it is,” greeted the medic. “You look well. You should because this might be one of the last exams. Your progress is remarkable and exceeds our expectations.”

“That’s good to hear,” Kris smiled. He was happy to know that the trials might be over soon.

“Yes its excellent news. Now follow assistant 3 to the X-ray room.”

Kris did as told. It only took a few minutes to take the images. Once they were done he went back to the exam room.

“Please take a seat,” the medic said as he patted the examination bed. “Have you been taking your vitamins and calcium correctly?”

“Yes, every day,” Kris replied as he sat on the bed, he had a strange sensation of experiencing a déjà vu, but he shrugged the feeling off.  

“Good, good,” he nodded. “Kris we have excellent data from the X-ray images, but only to an extent. We need more this time.”

“What do you mean?” Kris furrowed his brows together.

“The images show the bones morphology, but we need to look inside. Since we’ve got a lot of data already, we just need a peek inside your bones. That’s why we’re going to schedule a closed bone biopsy for later today.”

“A what?”

“Basically we remove a small sample of your bone without cutting open and exposing it. We inject local anesthesia to where we’ll make the extraction, that way you won’t feel pain during the procedure and be awake through it,” he paused and looked at Kris, waiting for a response.

“Okay…” he said after a few seconds. “Which part are you, um, extracting from?”

“The frontal-lower part of the leg. The tibia is close to the skin and far from any vital organs,” he explained. “We’ll make a small cut on the skin, just so we can have an easy access with the needle.”

“Needle?” Kris’s eyes went big. no!

“Oh, yeah,” he shrugged. “Don’t look so afraid. Yes, it’s a big needle, but you’ll hardly feel it with the drugs.”

“Easy for you to say,” he scoffed.

“I’m a medic, I studied years for this,” he grumbled. “Anyway, the needle will enter the bone and aspirate a small sample. Then we’ll close the cut and you can leave the OR with just a bandage on your leg. Pretty simple.”

“Yeah I guess,” Kris said, still feeling uneasy about it.

“Seriously, don’t worry about it,” the medic said reassuringly as he patted Kris’s shoulder. “Now you’re dismissed.”

True to his words the surgery was pretty simple and fast. Before he knew it, he was back in his room with only a band aid over a small cut on his right leg, the size of the tip of his finger.

“Will this leave a scar?” he wondered as he looked at his leg. He was sitting on his bed with his right leg extended before him. He noticed that the area around the wound they had shaved his leg. Curious he touched the hairless skin. “Wow, it’s so smooth,” he said to himself. It’s actually quite nice.

After two days, Mama went to visit him. She was cheerful and smiled like she used to, just like he remembered her from his childhood. She was proud of him, so proud it made his heart melt with warmth. Heck, she even hugged him, something she hadn’t done in years. She explained that the results exceeded their expectations, his bones were better than what they predicted. They were hollowed, porous, but dense and stiff making them lighter but much stronger. High bone density contributes to high strength-to-weight and stiffness-to-weight ratios, and is one of the ways in which bird skeletons were lightweight, she explained.

“You’re just like a bird,” she mused. “Tomorrow, we’ll execute the penultimate flight test. If you pass both, we’ll treat you a well-earned prize. Then we’ll ponder on how to keep progressing. Understood?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Good. Now rest well, tomorrow is going to be an important day.”

“Yes of course,” he agreed. She patted his shoulder affectionately before leaving his room.

“I’m just like a bird,” he said to himself with a broad smile and then continued to draw a Barn Owl, or more like an infant’s attempt to draw a simple ghost. Whatever.

The next day they immediately escorted him to test room B-3 after breakfast. The room was bigger than the previous ones he’s been in. There were monitors and high tech computers on top of desks at the right side of the room, leaving a small corridor between them and the huge Plexiglas cage with a tunnel inside. It used up all the remaining space of the room and it reached high up to the roof.

“A new day,” greeted lab assistant X2LA6. Kris immediately greeted back. “Today we don’t want to see you levitate off the ground, we want to see your response to different wind currents. And basically how well you can fly, we’ll start simple and easy, then gradually increase the difficulty.”

“Ok,” Kris agreed.

“This is a flight chamber and it works with a vertical wind tunnel,” she said as pointed at the chamber. “It’s a technique used to train soldiers for jumping out of planes.” Kris stared dumbly at her, not sure why that information was important to begin with. “Anyway, you see the floor is black right?” Kris nodded. “That’s because it’s a trampoline, it’s meant to help normal people elevate easier once the wind current starts. It’s also permeable enough to let air pass with ease. Under the trampoline is an inlet contractor, it accumulates the air and lets it go upward, elevating the person who wants to fly. And no, that’s not where the air current is created.”

“Really?”

“Yes, the current is created above. At the top, is a diffuser it the air from the tunnel and directs it to the outer top of the cage. There are four axial fans, very powerful. These fans create the current that circulates from the top to the bottom into the tunnel and then back to the top through the diffuser. That way we prevent multiple currents in the chamber. It’s a ‘re-circulating’ system. Get it?”

Kris nodded as he looked at all of the things the assistant mentioned, trying to take in the whole picture about the mechanics of the flight chamber. They gave him special clothing to avoid too much air friction, but it didn’t have the extra cloth between the arm and the chest, the way professional skydivers used. He didn’t need it. He entered the chamber once they asked him to, he step onto the trampoline, bouncing a little as he walked towards the center.

“First we want to see how well you fly without wind currents. It’ll be our control test. So please, fly around as high as you want,” the voice said from the earpiece they gave him.

A little embarrassed with everyone watching him, Kris elevated his body into the air steadily. It was like he was standing in midair. First he hovered off the ground at 80 cm and felt confident he could go higher. He looked at the roof and wondered if he was capable of reaching it. With ease he managed to elevate his body higher and higher, until he was at arm length from the grating that covered the diffuser. He went a little higher, just high enough for the top of his head to gently rest on the grating. He looked down, he was probably 6 meters high in the air. 6.25 m –his mind calculated. He felt amused as he watched the lab assistants stare at him in awe. He stayed up there for two minutes and the assistants only stared at him, completely forgetting to take notes. He felt comfortable in the air and even felt secure that if he were to fall from this height, his bones would be strong enough to not smash into smithereens. It would probably hurt a lot, he might break something, but he wouldn’t end up completely lifeless.

A mischievous grin broke through Kris’s lips and he let his body drop fast. He faked free fall and watched the assistants scream in terror. But at 80 cm from the ground, he stopped midair and slowly landed on his feet without getting hurt. He looked at the assistants with a playful smirk.

“Yah! What the hell! Don’t ever do that again,” the assistant yelled from the earpiece. “What if your flight control wasn’t good enough, you could’ve injured yourself or died.”

Kris mouthed back ‘I wanted to test my control.’

“You wanted to test your control?”

Kris nodded.

“That’s not for you to decide. Don’t do that again,” the assistant indignantly said. “We’ll start with the air current. We will gradually increase up to 60 km/h, which is half the average speed for a person of your size would gain during a free fall. We don’t want you to just let your body float in the air. We want you to try to move around, fight the current and try to go further. Understood?”

“Sounds like fun,” Kris said to himself as he raised a thumb up to the assistant.

A yellow light went off, blinking incessantly. Then Kris heard the mechanisms animate, the propellers began to spin. Air caressed his skin and clothes lightly at first, then it began to increase its force. Soon the air was swatting his body upward, elevating him slightly off the floor.

He moved against the current but it was strong. He tried to retreat a bit, but he was pushed back further than he expected. He glided midair, unsure of what to do. He looked at the assistants monitoring him. One noticed him looking back and made a circle hand motion. Kris tried flying in a circle close to the border of the tunnel, his flight became easier. He was at about half the height of the tunnel. Kris circled into the inside faster and began getting closer to the center. Once he managed to fly against the current unwavering, the assistant spoke and told him they would increase the speed.

They kept going on like that. The air current would be stronger; Kris would retreat upwards until he felt comfortable enough to fly against it, getting as close to the center and bottom as possible. It wasn’t until their reached 232 km/h that they stopped. With that speed, Kris was knocked back until his body was against the grill of the diffuser. They decreased the speed until Kris was able to fly to the bottom without struggle.

“Very good, that went brilliant,” an assistant said as he helped him out of the flight cage. “I’ll take you back to your room so you can rest properly for tomorrow’s test.”

Kris didn’t mind, for him flying was awesome.

The next test was more about agility and reaction. They took him outside for the first time in a long time. But it really wasn’t outside since the facility was underground, the outside consisted of an artificially made natural forest inside a dome –it even had a controlled ecosystem. It was exactly like being outside only that you could literally reach the sky.

Today’s test consisted in Kris flying around in an open area while using high tech glasses that showed images on the screen. The idea was to test Kris’ reaction to the projected images and see how well he could evade them as if they were obstacles in the sky.

Kris enjoyed this test. It was so fun, he could fly outside freely and not in some flight chamber. He could feel his body stretch and relax with every movement. He felt like a bird that was finally free from its cage. It was liberating.

When they told him they were done with the test, Kris didn’t want to get down. But the volitant boy followed the orders. A lab assistant led him to a different room, at a sector of the facility he hadn’t been to yet. When he stepped into the room he noticed it was decorated very differently from the rest. The walls were like orange agate, while the floor was marbled. The bed was big, colored tawny. The desk and bookcase where wooden and he noticed he wasn’t alone in the room.

“Mama?” he asked as he approached the woman sitting at the desk.

She smiled and stood up, happily greeting him with a hug. She told him that the tests were over, that the results he gave were more than enough and she was proud of him. He was so happy and filled with warmth, he felt accepted and loved. Then she showed him that he had a picture window that covered half the wall opposite to his bed. There was a balcony and it faced towards the outside, the woods, where he was earlier that day. She told him that his prize was that he was free to explore and fly around whenever he wanted, as long as he was back in his bedroom by nightfall.

“Oh, soon the next trials will begin,” she informed smoothly.

“There’s still more?”

“Yes dear,” she answered with a small smile. “But I believe these trials will be much more fun. It’s about developing your skills,” she paused. “There’s a lake in the forest, find it and you’ll find someone like you,” she said before leaving.

Kris contemplated towards the window, wondering what she really meant by that.